Moving Metal

Poor record keeping in the office made things worse, resulting in misplaced inventory, expensive stock hunts, shipping errors, and excessive overtime. “I’ve seen as long as three hours spent looking for a skid of sheet stock that wasn’t where it was supposed to be,” Gimbel reported. “By the time you’ve dug out your wanted skids and put material that was above them somewhere else, only the memory of the worker who has been filling the orders can tell you where anything is.” Multiple shifts only compounded the problem, he added, since “the day shift has no way of knowing where the night shift has put which item in the stockpile, and vice versa.” The coil pyramids presented a challenge to forklift opera- tors and put tremendous pressure on the coils at the bottom. If a coil at floor level was ever squeezed out of its cradle, the whole pile could collapse. “It happened once with us,” Gimbel recalled. “Sent a coil right through the steel outer wall of the warehouse.” Overhead cranes, meanwhile, swung above the floor to retrieve the sheet. “Any time you crane lift sheet stock from a pile of skids you endanger people in the area,” Gimbel noted. “A worker can fail to see a swinging load. If something slips, an entire load of sheet can spill onto the floor.” Not surprisingly, injuries were too frequent and workers’ compensation insurance costs were high. Gimbel worried about how to boost both productivity and employee safety in the warehouse. After May 1960, when Reliance’s warehouse workers and truck drivers joined International Longshore and Warehouse Union Local 26, safety was a key issue as the union negotiated its first collective bargaining agreement. Gimbel knew that something would have to be done if Reliance was to continue expanding its operations, estab-

Gimbel was also troubled about Reliance’s warehouse operations. The new plant and equipment notwithstand- ing, it seemed to him that operations were still stuck in the past technologically. His six-man warehouse crew struggled with antiquated inventory storage and handling techniques: sheet metal inventory was stacked on pallets or skids covering 32,000 square feet of floor space. Coils of metal were stacked in unstable pyramids elsewhere in the warehouse. Even though the 850-foot long, 225-foot wide structure was brand-new, floor space was rapidly filling up. While making rounds among the growing number of skids and pyramids, Gimbel considered the needless expenses associated with the manual handling of stock. Stacking pallets of metal sheet on the floor posed particular problems. It was generally accepted that whenever metal sheets were handled they would be damaged, usually on the edges, from forklifts, crane hooks, accidental spills, and bumps. Moreover, stock that came into the warehouse first was usually on the floor for a long time since employees tended to fill orders from the top to save time. That forlorn bottom stock subsequently bore all the weight of later loads that were placed on top, and often became unusable over time due to deterioration and pressure damage. Addi- tionally, whenever an employee raised a loaded skid with a crane or forklift, nails in the skid invariably worked loose and marred metal surfaces underneath. The losses added up over time, since trimming and refinishing required a lot of effort and produced scrap of little value. The damage was particularly embarrassing when no one spotted it before delivery. “When [the customer] found it,” Gimbel complained, “we had to spend non-productive man hours in sending a truck to his plant to pick up the damaged order and replace it with fresh stock.”

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